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PostgreSQL 7.4 queries \'up to 400% faster now\'

By admin | November 19, 2003

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG) has released version 7.4 of the PostgreSQL Object Relational Database Management System (ORDBMS). PGDG says this release is the work of \”our world wide network of hundreds of developers and contributors over the last 9 months. It provides commercial-grade enterprise database functionality and performance with the flexibility and low total cost of ownership widely associated with Open Source software.

Version 7.4 includes a host of new features which make PostgreSQL a more powerful and scalable database for large enterprises. These include AMD Opteron optimization, improved index maintenance tools, and enhanced support of full text indexing which adds ranked result sets. Combined with the recent contribution of the eRServer replication solution by PostgreSQL, these advances fulfill PostgreSQL\’s potential to run high-availability, large-scale data centers.

Hash aggregation in memory, query planner improvement for subqueries, a new wire protocol, and expanded functional and expressional indexes were also added by the PGDG. These features will improve query and procedure performance for all size databases, in some cases by as much as 400%.

Key features in the new release include:

– IN/NOT IN subqueries are now much more efficient
– Improved GROUP BY processing by using hash buckets
– New multikey hash join capability
– Queries using the explicit JOIN syntax are now better optimized
– Faster and more powerful regular expression code
– Function-inlining for simple SQL functions
– Full support for IPv6 connections and IPv6 address data types
– Major improvements in SSL performance and reliability
– Make free space map efficiently reuse empty index pages, and other
– SQL-standard information schema
– Cursors conform more closely to the SQL standard
– Cursors can exist outside transactions
– New client-to-server protocol
– libpq and ECPG applications are now fully thread-safe
– New version of full-text indexing
– New autovacuum tool
– Array handling has been improved and moved into the server core